ELSEWHERE

Christopher Nelson says that he too is an academic and he therefore knows why Keith Burgess-Jackson criticizes Andrew Sullivan a lot: Keith is envious of Sullivan's big readership. I think that shows that Nelson is a very young academic indeed. Academics traditionally care little about getting a wide public audience. It is their fellow academics they want to address. They want a high-level audience, not a mass audience. We academics are probably incapable of addressing a mass audience effectively anway. You have to be a politician or a film-maker for that. And among academics I would warrant that Keith already has a much bigger audience than Sullivan -- simply because Keith writes at a consistently academic standard. I myself have never found Sullivan very original and so never now read his blog unless someone points me to something on it but Keith is obviously optimistic enough to think he can talk sense into Sullivan where he needs it. The readership of this blog is small too when compared with Sullivan's readership but I know from the many emails I get that it is a thinking and intelligent audience and that certainly suits me.

Keith has a good comment on Leftist objections to THAT film: "And isn't it odd to see liberals, who usually defend the most obnoxious speech and art, come down so hard on a film?"

One of the great triumphs of the Australian Left has been to convict white Australians of the "stolen generation" crime -- the alleged forcible removal of 100,000 black children from their families so they could be brought up by white foster-parents instead. There has even been a film made about the subject -- Rabbit-proof fence -- which claims to be a documentary. The whole story is however just another Leftist lie -- as Andrew Bolt sets out at length here. The slender basis of fact that the story relies on is that some 1930s official do-gooders -- predecessors of the modern LEFT -- did place a few mixed-race children in white foster homes to give them a better chance in life -- but the placement was always made with written parental consent. There was NO forced removal. Nobody and nothing was "stolen". And that's not just Andrew Bolt's opinion. It is the finding of a year-long $10 million Australian court case about the claim. Officialdom acted only when the parents either did not want the children or felt that they could not care for them adequately.

Keith Windschuttle is again upsetting the Leftists and their view of Australian blacks: "Remote Aboriginal communities are a "failure" and their inhabitants should be moved to mainstream towns for their own good, historian Keith Windschuttle has claimed. Windschuttle told a conference in Perth yesterday the indigenous communities were the legacy of a 100-year-old policy of segregation that was continuing to fail Aboriginal people. He said Aborigines would be better off in urban centres where they could have access to jobs and social services. "On every measure of human wellbeing - employment, health and education - remote communities are a failure," he said". As Windschuttle also points out at length here, the do-gooders have always wanted to keep Australia's indigenous blacks in a sort of permanent anthropological zoo rather than treating them as real people.

RALPH NADER INC: "U.S. traffic fatalities per 100 million miles traveled had fallen rapidly throughout the century, from 24 in 1921 to 5.3 in 1965". All without Ralph Nader's help -- despite what his supporters claim. See also here: Ralph's ties with anti-import textile magnates and plaintiff lawyers, ...the best-paid lawyers in America..., undermine his claim to champion the 'little guy'

What "liberalism" has wrought: "In the wake of a fatal shooting, the security for a D.C. high school was officially turned over to the city's police department last week. Armed officers will patrol the halls. This is one more indication of the severe problems haunting the public school system: violence, illegal drugs, the mandating of medication such as Ritalin, low academic achievement, controversial curricula, perceived prejudice against boys."

"Cato the Elder" links to an article by Ion Mihai Pacepa (former Soviet bloc spymaster) saying that the absurd accusations made by John Kerry about the U.S. army in Vietnam look like being lifted directly from KGB propaganda of the time.

David's Medienkritik has excellent excerpts from two speeches by former V.P. Spiro Agnew showing that Leftist bias in the media was already pervasive in the 1960s.

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

Three more examples of Leftist dishonesty: They blame the 9/11 attacks on "poverty" in the Islamic world. Yet most of the attackers were Saudis and Saudi Arabia is one of the world's richest countries! They also say that they oppose racism yet support "affirmative action" -- which judges people by the colour of their skin! They say that they care about "the poor" but how often do you hear them calling for the one thing that would bring about a worldwide economic boom in poor countries -- the USA and the EU abandoning their agricultural protectionism? Leftists obviously care more about conservative farmers than they do about the poor!

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